Capturetrainridefight! – Dragon’s Prophet’s Open Beta

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Everyone, I think I might be a prophet. Like, I’m just walking along, going about my daily business, when these senses-overwhelming glimpses of the future appear in my inbox. It’s crazy. They tell me – in voices I imagine to be terrifyingly thunderous – of videogames that won’t be out for weeks. Sometimes even months! Why was I chosen to bear this terrible burden? I may never know. But my latest bone-rattling email from the beyond has told me that SOE’s monster-taming MMO, Dragon’s Prophet, is going into open beta next week. Hmm, wonder what that’s all abo- HNRRRGHH. Oh jeez, I’m having a vision! See it… HMRRR… afterURRRGH… the break.

Those sure were some dragons. Except that slithering gorilla thing. I feel like dragging one’s tree-trunk-sized arms might be stretching the definition of “dragon” a little.

The open beta kicks off on May 30th, with Founders gaining early access on May 29th. But what does a dragon prophet actually do? These things, mostly:

“In a world shaped by dragon-kind, more than 300 unique dragons roam the lands. Fight, capture, train and ride them in order to unlock their unique skills and abilities.”

“The dragons you choose to capture shape your character and, ultimately, your fate. Will you be a legendary tank or a famous healer? Do you lead the charge or let your dragons bear the brunt of the fighting? Training the right dragons is the difference between life and death!”

OK then, I’m gonna pick Obvious Traitor Dragon. I have a really good feeling about that guy. But yes, the dragons look impressively large and varied, and the rest seems, er, like an MMO. Should be worth a quick look, if nothing else. I’m getting a kind of TERA-meets-Pokemon vibe from the whole thing. How about you?

27 Comments

Such a horrible game – You constantly move through mobs while attacking, the world is horrible, the graphics are horrible, the combat system is frankly underwhelming and in general, this is a game to stay away from. Usually in alphas/beta’s its pretty easy to get an idea of how the final game will end up in terms of polish, and this is not very promising in any way.
Edit: Its a bit disconcerting, all these rather poor MMO’s SOE has added to its fold recently- Wizardry was also a really really bad MMO, and now this?

Honestly, when I saw the trailer for the Wizardry MMO, I was excited. Every bit of it oozed Dark Souls. Then I read about the mechanics, and got more excited. Gygaxian sensibility, etc. Then I played the game, and it was utterly unplayable, thanks to lag and poor servers. What a shame.

I played the Beta of this over the w/e – it’s pretty bad at the moment.

Problem is that huge chunks of it aren’t even translated – including things like the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ options in every dialog – so you’re guessing wtf is going on (they fixed that part way through the w/e, in fairnes)

Combat is an interesting idea but there’s zero feedback to it – you cannot tell if you’re doing good or bad damage and to what/where/when.

Quests often just end without a result – in one case I handed-in to someone who was supposed to explain something and instead of doing that he just ran off, leaving several other people wondering how the hell to hand their quest in!!

It’s also a bloated client, slow to load, mandatory and unskippable intro videos – you don’t do that in an MMO. I swear it takes about 4-5 mins to run the game!!

It needs a LOT of work – it’s nowhere near a level that I’d bother playing right now.

Anyways, the little I got to play the beta on monday, I concur with your feelings of the game. It’s a big mess at the moment. There is some potential there, but this game is far from ready for open beta.

I can barely contain my excitement for the release of this homerun… = |

Anywho, what is up with betas these days? Must every game have an “open beta” these days, which is just a euphamism for ” we are releasing the game with laundry list of bugs”. What happened to release dates? Are release dates going the way of subscriptions, paying for games, physical copies, and instruction manuals?

I for one don’t mind so much losing all the other stuff (except instruction manuals, I miss those). But I have to draw the line at release dates. No more of this “I want to start making money on my game, but it is not complete, so I will say it is in ‘beta’ and unleash it on the world months before it is ready.”

This game is laughably bad. I can’t fathom how in 2013 people put up with this. It felt like I was playing a game from 10 years ago, and not in a cool nostalgic way, but in a “wow this crap really sucks compared to today’s games” way.

I concur. I know it’s beta (but then isn’t everything these days?) but it’s soooo bad. I’m no graphics whore, but there’s no denying it’s pug ugly* – and I still play Ponpoko on Mame! I was in the last beta and it’s not changed much at all since. Definitely worthy of an immediate uninstall.

*This comment is in no way meant to offend pugs, or pug owners. They are in fact very cute dogs.

The game itself is not that bad. The game mechanics are fun. Taming dragons, training them and ride them into battle is quite a nice feeling. The Combat mechanics are also nice ( doing combos with your mouse buttons).
There is also pvp and housing.
But it feels really really unpolished up to now.
I thought Open Beta should start with no known bugs open, but this will be not the case.

No OB has ever been bug free but here we’re talking about whole areas of features being missing, loads of translation being missing and a client which is bloated and unoptimised (and thus will put people off)

Just that intro area with all the text overlapping and cutscenes crashing in and out etc. is a sign it’s not ready – let alone the rest of the game…

Only seen TotalBiscuits video about this, it has some neat concepts but according to the posts here it’s still buggy will wait unti it’s out of Beta to try it. Though to be honest graphic wise I have no complains about it unlike some people here.